Julie Kafka PhD, MPH

Julie Kafka, PhD, MPH

Julie Kafka, PhD, MPH, was recently awarded the UNC Graduate School’s Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. This honor is bestowed by the dean of the UNC Graduate School on candidates who score highly on a rigorous evaluation of their research. In addition to this prestigious recognition, Kafka was selected as a UNC Injury Prevention Research Center (IPRC) Injury and Violence Prevention Fellow in 2019, was awarded Emerging Research Program funding from UNC IPRC, and worked as a research assistant on several projects.

We reached out to Kafka to learn more about her work, her life, and her academic journey through the following Q & A.

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How did you get to this point? Where did you grow up and how did you end up at UNC in this field?

Growing up outside Boston, both of my parents worked in mental/behavioral health, treating and supporting individuals impacted by violence. This included survivors, perpetrators, and children who had witnessed violence in the home. Interpersonal violence was a common topic of conversation at the dinner table, and it became something I cared deeply about addressing. In high school, I interned at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and during college I provided childcare for women in domestic violence group counseling. Like so many of us, I came to know far too many people who had experienced violence at the hands of someone close to them. It is easy to feel despair and hopelessness in the face of violence, but these were formative experiences for me that highlighted the urgent need for systems-level solutions, including policies, programs, and funding to support larger initiatives to help survivors of violence and their families. While individual-level work is critical, we need macro-level change to effectively prevent and interrupt violence in the US.

With that goal in mind, I came to UNC in 2016 for my master’s in public health (MPH) in the Department of Health Behavior to study solutions to address intimate partner violence (IPV). I worked with my advisor, Dr. Beth Moracco, on several applied research projects to evaluate civil legal processes and policy interventions to protect IPV survivors. It was energizing to be immersed in prevention. While receiving amazing mentorship and support from Dr. Moracco, I also unexpectedly fell in love with the research process itself. As a result, I decided to stick around for my PhD, and I’m so glad that I did! I have been connected to so many leaders in the field of violence prevention, and it has been a truly exciting and humbling journey.

Can you tell us more about the academic work you’ve been doing? What paved the way for you once you got to UNC and helped you achieve this recognition?

Before I began my PhD, I took a summer position in Raleigh at the North Carolina Department of Public Health focused on improving accessibility and visibility of the state’s Violent Death Reporting System (VDRS). VDRS is a public health data system that collects the most comprehensive and detailed information about homicide and suicide deaths in the US. The North Carolina Department of Public Health folks have a strong relationship with the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, which made it easy for me to gain mentorship and support in this new setting. Scott Proescholdbell, the lead investigator for North Carolina’s VDRS, took me under his wing and really helped me succeed in this role.

This is where my dissertation came into focus. VDRS has one variable that captures whether IPV was a contributing factor for each death, but I noticed that it wasn’t systematically recorded for suicides. This felt like a significant gap. Research has already shown that being involved in an abusive relationship, either as a survivor or perpetrator, can lead to depression, social isolation, and suicidal thoughts. Why not capture and count cases where IPV contributed to suicide?

To address this question, my research documented the link between IPV and suicide using unstructured text data from VDRS. With the help of my advisor, we created a coding protocol to review available summary text from suicides and record whether IPV was described as a contributing factor. With a small group of fellow students, colleagues, and new mentors, we hand-reviewed thousands of cases and found evidence that IPV was a contributing factor in more than 1 in 16 suicides in North Carolina. This process was valuable, but manual review of death record text in VDRS is time consuming and emotionally draining; these are violent events with lots of graphic details in the text. To make this process scalable, I developed a supervised machine learning tool that conducts the text coding for us. My machine learning tool was trained using 8,500 hand-coded cases as the gold standard. In a held-out test of 1,500 new suicide cases, we found that the tool accurately labels the presence or absence of IPV circumstances with high sensitivity and a robust F1 score. This supervised machine learning tool is now publicly available on Github and it opens the door to additional research, monitoring, and prevention of IPV-related suicide at a national scale.

The supportive network at UNC and beyond was really what made this project possible.

There is a famous saying that “what gets measured gets managed.” I believe strongly in good measurement and its ability to help change our conceptualization of a problem. By better understanding and measuring the link between IPV and suicide, I hope that it can hasten our response to addressing these problems more proactively through policy, programming, funding, and outreach to (hopefully) improve people’s lives.

What would you like to say in response to being honored in this way?

I want to say thank you to my advisor Dr. Beth Moracco, to the faculty in the Department of Health Behavior, to my dissertation committee, to my collaborators at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, to Scott Proescholdbell at the North Carolina Department of Public Health, and our hard-working team of hand-coders. I have received tremendous support, training, and encouragement throughout my graduate studies from these sources and others. I’m deeply grateful to be surrounded by such an engaged, passionate, dedicated, and responsible community of public health researchers, practitioners, and educators.

I also want to say thank you to the UNC Graduate School, and to the UNC faculty for recognizing this work and putting a spotlight on IPV and suicide. This recognition will help direct more attention and resources toward saving and improving the lives of people who are impacted by these dire problems.


The UNC Graduate School’s 2023 Distinguished Dissertation award is presented to exceptional PhD candidates for the quality of their dissertations based on their academic record, originality of work, readability, research design, research significance and overall score. Their scores are based on a set of guidelines that measure how compelling, relevant, and clearly articulated the dissertation is. About this award.